


Sock It To Me

by DesertScribe



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bill Cipher Doesn't Have As Much Chill As He Thinks He Does, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, POV Bill Cipher, Puppets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24583036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: During the events of Sock Opera, Bill decides to focus his efforts on Mabel instead of Dipper.
Relationships: Bill Cipher & Mabel Pines
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	Sock It To Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/gifts).



**[Monday, the 11th]**

It all started on an ordinary summer day in the tiny Oregon town of Gravity Falls.

Lumberjacks were chopping down trees.

Fairies and gnomes and other supposedly imaginary creatures were scampering through the magical part of the forest where the Lumberjacks had long ago learned to never set foot in because sometimes the trees there sometimes took unexpected offense at being chopped and fought back in various weird and unpleasant ways, such as spraying glowing sap which stank like turpentine and caused whoever touched it to get obnoxious pop songs stuck in their heads for days at a time.

Teenagers were loafing around town and trying not to look as bored as they felt.

Sandra Jimenez was preparing a three part exposé on the true ingredients used in Gravity Falls' school lunch mystery meat (Spoiler: it was the exact same thing as school lunch mystery meat all over the country, a blend of texturized vegetable protein and the cheapest parts of a cow which could still legally be classified as beef, not the rumored ninety percent sawdust, seven percent brown pond scum, and three percent bear meat as had been believed by a majority of local students since time immemorial. Also a spoiler: no one was going to believe her, and the sawdust/pond scum/bear meat rumor was going to persist for decades into the future, because it was more entertaining than the truth) and dreaming of the day when she finally got some real news to report.

The Hand Witch was picking up a bulk order of manicure products from the post office, because even a menagerie of disembodied hands deserves a little pampering from time to time.

Bud Gleeful was selling used cars and hoping that if he smiled enough then everyone would forget that his son had faked psychic powers by spying on the whole town and gotten sent to prison for it. Bud had a slight nagging feeling that Lil' Gideon had also done something else to help land himself in prison, something involving that huge pile of broken metal pieces which Bud had sold for scrap, but he couldn't remember what it was, so he figured it couldn't have been all that bad.

The Society of the Blind Eye was capturing and erasing the memories of anyone who admitted to seeing anything outside of the acceptable definition of 'ordinary.'

Lazy Susan was experimenting with a new menu item for Greasy's Diner and coming to the conclusion that wrapping an extra-large pancake around one of her famous coffee omelets had some good potential as a local variation of a breakfast taco, but squashing it all into a hot waffle iron to give it a toasty outer crust might be taking culinary creativity into realm of difficult to clean up and, if the smoke beginning to fill the kitchen was any indication, also a fire hazard.

Stanley Pines was pretending to be his twin brother Stanford Pines while soaking gullible tourists for every cent he could get out of them.

Dipper Pines was continuing his quest to discover the identity of the author of the mysterious secret-filled journal which had introduced him to the seemingly unending weirdness surrounding and permeating Gravity Falls, and he had just discovered that the equally mysterious ancient laptop computer was not too old to predate password protection.

Mabel Pines was falling headlong into full "all-consuming crush on a boy she just met" mode. Again. At least the part where she overcommitted herself to an extremely elaborate puppet show was new.

And unseen by any of those people (all without any help from the Society of the Blind Eye, thank you very much) Bill Cipher, interdimensional dream demon, destroyer of worlds, master of the Nightmare Realm, and winner of the award for Most Malevolent Geometric Shape In The Multiverse more than a billion years running, was keeping tabs on the few people who were destined to be able to pose any danger to his ability to bring his ancient plans to fruition.

Unfortunately for Bill, he was not all powerful or omnipresent, at least not yet. Therefore, as the younger set of Pines twins began to pursue their separate goals he could only follow one at a time. He briefly considered following Pine Tree, because the kid's high-strung earnestness and desire to know everything made him an easy target for Bill's methods. Playing Pine Tree for a sucker would be a walk in the park, like manipulating an unripe version of Sixer. But, Bill considered further, taking the easy route of going after Pine Tree would leave the kid's sister unsupervised for large chunks of time, which might come back to bite him in the hypotenuse later, since she was the less predictable of the two, and their encounter in the mindscape had showed her as a force to be reckoned with once she figured out the rules of the game. With that in mind, Pine Tree was the safer of the two to turn his back on, Bill decided. Better to keep his eye on the wildcard.

"You don't know it yet, Shooting Star," Bill said, rubbing his hands together with anticipation while he invisibly drifted along in Mabel's wake as she went running out of the Gravity Falls Public Library to begin sketching out plans for her puppet extravaganza, "but you and I are going to be spending a lot of time together. _A lot_ of time…."

And just like that, unseen by anyone in that dimension, including the self-proclaimed all-seeing eye, the path of future events began shifting in a new direction.

* * *

**[Tuesday, the 12th]**

Bill considered spending a few days watching and waiting to make sure it was the right time to make his play, because what was the span of a few days within the grand scheme of a trillion years of, well, grandly scheming? Not even a drop in the bucket of a drop in the bucket, that's what. He could wait as long as he needed to wait, and the anticipation would just make the satisfaction all the sweeter when he finally sprung his trap, first on Shooting Star and then on this whole universe. And that was what he intended to do right now... except the perfect opportunity to get things rolling presented itself the very next night, and he wasn't the kind of dream demon to turn down an opening like that when the universe presented it to him on a platter.

It was simple, really. Shooting Star wasn't stupid, at least not by the ridiculously low limitations of a species so far below Bill's own amazingness, and beneath her cheerful façade she knew what kind of workload she had committed herself to without stopping to think better of it. She was already growing more frantic as the time of her promised puppet show loomed ever closer with each passing hour and the scope of her plans continued to expand, requiring the construction of more and more puppets and set pieces. As Bill watched, he could see that she was already dreaming about puppets that very first night without any prompting from him at all. The fact was readily apparent even from the outside, thanks to the way that she tossed and turned in her sleep, muttering lines from the parts of her script which she still wasn't satisfied with yet while opening and closing her hands as if working the mouths of invisible puppets.

Slipping into her dreams only made the scope of her anxiety about the upcoming production and what it meant for her chances with Puppet Boy more obvious. Her dreamscape was a brightly colored seething riot of puppetry chaos. If Bill didn't know any better, he might be tempted to think that the kid had been stealing peeks at the Nightmare Realm and replaying what she saw with the saturation levels turned up to eleven and all of the spilling entrails and blood replaced with yarn and glitter. There was no telling how all that unrest was playing out in the deeper levels of her mind, not without a deal to let him in sealed with a handshake, but he was willing to bet that it would be glorious to behold.

There was always room for improvement, though, so Bill added a few subtle extra touches here and there to magnify her both perception of the potential for failure and her sense of how far reaching the consequences of that failure would be for the rest of her life. He threw in a few boos from unseen sources in the imagined audience, and her subconscious took that and ran with it, turning it into everyone booing her favorite musical number. He puppeted her mental image of Puppet Boy (and loved the irony of that fact as he did so!) into turning away from her in disgust instead of comforting her with platitudes about how he could see the genius of her creative expression even if no one else could, as it would have played out without Bill's interference.

After that, it was just a matter of sitting back and letting Shooting Star's worries do all the work. Bill briefly considered stepping in to end the dream with the entire stage exploding from the sheer force of her theatrical incompetence, destroying everything she had worked so hard to create. However, he decided to save that one for the next time, because the escalating horror people felt when they thought things couldn't get any worse and then you showed them that, yes, things could get very much worse in ways they had never imagined was far more entertaining than a simple one and done that dropped so much on the victim at once that they couldn't process the best parts of their torture, and Bill liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of other people's misery.

* * *

By the time Mabel got up for breakfast the next morning, the dream was all but forgotten, wiped away by subsequent cycles in and out of REM sleep, at least on a conscious level, allowing her to go about her song writing and puppet building with her normal cheerful enthusiasm. On a subconscious level, however, a film of mental residue left behind by the dream lingered in the corners of her mind, just like all dreams left behind to one degree or another in any human with a fully functional brain. If dreams left behind a thick enough layer, a person could remember nearly the whole thing. If a dream left behind an extremely thin layer, it would be as if the dream had never happened until someday, possibly years later, a seemingly random sensory input would trigger a vague feeling which the person experiencing it couldn't understand where it had come from or how it connected to their current situation.

In this case, it wouldn't be enough for the kid to remember any of the details if anyone happened to ask her what she had dreamed about the night before (Spoiler: nobody asked; Shooting Star steered as much of the conversation as possible toward discussing the work still necessary to have the production ready in time, and in most cases she succeeded, except with Fez, who only reiterated his complete disinterest in knowing what she was doing), but it would be enough for everything to feel extremely familiar if (If? Ha! More like when!) she happened to have a similar one later.

All of this was exactly as Bill had planned it, and he also planned to help guide that aforementioned similar dream to happen in about—he briefly conjured a comically oversized watch made of poisonous metals not native to this dimension into existence so he could check the time and then let it collapse back into nothingness—nineteen hours, thirty five minutes, and seventeen seconds, give or take a few seconds, depending on his mood.

Until then, he had plenty of time for a short excursion to check on some of the other metaphorical pies he had his fingers in across various dimensions, such as seeing if anyone had managed to locate old Sixer yet….

* * *

**[Wednesday, the 13th]**

Bill came back to Mabel's dreams and worked his particular brand of magic again the following night. This time around he needed to walk the delicate balance of starting early enough in the night to ensure that she would poorly rested and therefore more suggestible the following day while at the same time late enough that more memories negative emotions lingered afterwards, edging into her conscious mind, leaving her more open to accepting the offer that he was going to make to her. He nudged her dreams into playing out a lot like they had the done the night before but now a little bit worse in every way, remaining hidden all the while. After all, the goal was to drive her into accepting his "help," not to let her know that he was the source of her torments, at least not until it was too late. He ended his production with the fiery destruction he had resisted using before.

He expected that finale to send the kid jolting awake in a cold sweat, possibly with a side of screaming, which would have the added benefit of startling Pine Tree into screaming too. Not startling him awake, though, because the last time Bill had looked, that one had still been hunched over Glasses's old homemade laptop computer, hoping to guess the correct password for it to share the secrets of The Author and of the universe. The joke was on Pine Tree, though, because Glasses had never bothered to store any great secrets on that machine, aside from some old family recipes passed down through generations of McGuckets and the other various hillbilly clans they had intermarried with over the years. Bill doubted Pine Tree would find any enlightenment in Great Great Great Granny McGucket's famous secret recipe for Dutch Oven Goat-Cheesy Grits Casserole With Burdock Leaves And Opossum Meat, even though there were certain people in Tennessee who would kill for that information.

Other than that, there wasn't much stored on the machine beyond research notes from the investigations which Glasses had accompanied Sixer on when they weren't working on the portal, which Pine Tree had already read most of in Sixer's journal, and Glasses's plans and schematics for various giant death machines, which these days the self-made crackpot was more than willing to share with anyone who so much as seemed like they might ask him about it. No, the biggest revelation to be found on that machine was Glasses's collection of Star Wreck: The Nearly Original Series fan fiction, which meant that Pine Tree's futile frustration would be pretty much equal regardless whether he failed or succeeded at finding the password. From both a tactical standpoint and an entertainment standpoint, it was a win-win situation for Bill, so the dream demon was willing to continue leaving Pine Tree to his own devices aside from occasionally looking in on him to point and laugh.

Of course, if Pine Tree didn't manage to either brute force the password or smash the laptop in frustration by the time Bill conned Shooting Star into letting him hijack her physical form, then the first thing he was going to do with her body would be to smash that laptop while claiming it held every answer the kid could have ever wanted about anything and laugh at the look on his face. Actually, that would be the second thing he did. The first thing he was going to do would be to steal that journal, which was the real potential threat here, and burn it before Pine Tree had a chance to stop him, and _then_ he would smash the laptop, slowly and at his leisure because he would be free to have fun with it once the real threat of the journal was already out of the way.

However, Shooting Star didn't wake up screaming, so Pine Tree didn't get startled into screaming either. She didn't wake herself out of the dream at all. No, what happened next was even better as far as Bill was concerned. The dream kept going. First the dream's version of Gabe and then the entire dream audience melted into a literal giant puddle of disapproval, which sloshed around angrily and dissolved and subsumed the burnt out wreck of the theater, leaving behind only a small pedestal like section of stage beneath Shooting Star's feet and the proscenium arch overhead with a lone surviving spotlight shining down on her.

Then, apparently still unsatisfied, the Disapproval Puddle rose up taller and taller into an even bigger Disapproval Blob and proceeded to go on a kaiju style rampage, destroying all of Gravity Falls and then all of the west coast of North America and then the entire planet and, almost as an afterthought, the moon.

Finally, with nothing else left to eat nearby, the now planet sized Disapproval Blob opened up a cavern in itself for the sole purpose of coughing as if it had something stuck in its previous nonexistent throat until it coughed up the pet pig and caught it in a vaguely hand shaped pseudopod.

"Waddles!" Shooting Star shouted from her still untouched piece of stage now drifting in space, happy to see that at least one thing she loved was not gone for good.

The pig, on the other hand, showed no interest in being reunited with its sparkly human companion. Instead, it gave a disdainful snort and turned its back on the girl in favor of cuddling up against the Disapproval Blob. The Disapproval Blob patted the pig on the head, and then they both put on matching neon framed sunglasses and flew away together to some other solar system in some other galaxy so as to get as far from Shooting Star as possible, eating the sun on their way out.

This left the kid drifting all alone in empty space with nothing but a jagged collection of floorboards and single spotlight, which had remained glaring down at her throughout all of the destruction but now flickered and went out with a sound like someone blowing a raspberry. They say that "in space, no one can hear you scream," but either Shooting Star hadn't heard that bit of wisdom, or she didn't believe it, because when she let loose her pent up scream of despair, it tore across all the countless lightyears and echoed back from the outer edges of the universe.

Bill wiped an imaginary tear from his eye in appreciation. What he had just witnessed was beautiful and was made all the better by the fact that he hadn't had to lift a finger to make Shooting Star dream any of that. She had come up with that whole last display of escalating destruction all on her own. Bill had to admit that he liked the way the kid's mind worked. If she had imagined causing chaos like that on purpose instead of by accident, then he would have to admire her go-get-'em attitude. In fact, if that whole scene were to be replayed with added intent on Shooting Star's part, then it would bear a fair bit of similarity to how Bill had destroyed his own home dimension.

It almost made Bill regret how he was going to use her like a pawn and then throw her away. But only "almost." Bill Cipher didn't do regrets. The only interaction Bill had with feelings of regret was causing them in other people. As far as he was concerned, regrets were for losers, literally, and he planned to extend his winning streak beyond the heat death of this and any other universe.

It wouldn't do to let Shooting Star be _too_ much of a mental wreck the next day, though, Bill figured, not if he wanted to lay the best possible groundwork for getting what he wanted, because being too much of a mental wreck could be just as useless to him as being not enough of a mental wreck. Sixer and Glasses were both prime examples of that. With that in mind, he helped ease the kid back down into deeper levels of sleep below where dreaming happened. Then he sat back to let the rest of the night play out with minimal interference on his part.

Minimal interference turned out to include squashing a subsequent dream where Shooting Star's subconscious tried to suggest that she could track down the feral boy band who lived in the woods to ask them if they would be willing to use their stage experience and five pairs of hands to help her with her puppet show. As soon as Bill saw where things were going, he put the kibosh on it and replaced the boy band members with five copies of Gabe, who surrounded her while making Big Sad Kitten Eyes ™ (which were a whole level of magnitude more powerful than Puppy Eyes ™) and pleading that she make sure not to let lerp upper show disappoint him/them.

Really, that could practically be considered doing the kid a favor by keeping her from pulling the scab off of old heartbreak and making her go through that old cycle of pre-teen angst all over again when Bill had a brand new cycle of angst ready and waiting for her to experience it. Bill would call it a night well spent for the both of them.

* * *

**[Thursday, the 14th]**

It was the night before the big show. Shooting Star had, as usual for the past few days, spent every free waking moment of leisure time working on every aspect of her production, sometimes doing multiple tasks at once. She had even roped Ice Cube and Question Mark into joining Pine Tree in helping her out after they had all finished selling useless junk to tourists for the day. Having so many of the small selection of humans capable of forming the zodiac configuration necessary to cut off his access to this dimension made him itch a little bit, especially when Fez wandered past to look in on things, but none of that would matter if Bill's plan worked, allowing him to preemptively destroy all records of how they could do that before anyone realized such information might be important.

Now, the kid was tucked into bed, surrounded by her favorites of the puppets, not suspecting that soon she would be tricked into becoming a puppet too. Bill rubbed his hands together in anticipation. He had spent the last few nights building up to this moment, and tonight was the night to step out from behind the curtain and into the spotlight to say hello. It wasn't long before Shooting Star's eyes were darting back and forth beneath her closed lids as she started dreaming.

Introducing himself during the first REM cycle of the night would be jumping the gun, too likely to be forgotten and overwritten with the memories of subsequent dreams, but the time was getting so close that Bill could taste it. He briefly considered passing the time by going to mess with Pine Tree, who had considerately snuck off elsewhere with the laptop so as to avoid disrupting his sister's sleep with his continued attempts at codebreaking, but Bill didn't want to risk getting so caught up in taunting Pine Tree that he missed his cue with Shooting Star. Once his plan succeeded, he would have all the time in the world for that kind of fun and lots of other messier kinds of fun too. For now, he would stick to the fun of manipulating Shooting Star.

With that in mind, Bill stepped into Shooting Star's mindscape. Just because it wasn't quite time to start interfering with her dreams for the night didn't mean he couldn't enjoy watching the pregame show of whatever her brain came up with without his help.

As usual, the fleshy little human known as Mabel Pines did not disappoint. Tonight, she had taken her work home with her, so to speak, and was mentally playing out parts of her show's script over and over as her subconscious became just as obsessed with improving the plot as her conscious mind was during the day. For a story supposedly about love and romance, there sure were a lot of explosions and dismemberment. Bill approved.

He spent a few enjoyable sleep cycles watching the dream puppet show become more and more elaborate, and then it was finally late enough in the night that he could make his sales pitch and know that Shooting Star would remember it in the morning. He waited for the delightful chaotic mess of a theatrical spectacle to play out all the way to its convoluted end one more time and then muted the audience so his voice and applause were the only things audible in the dream auditorium.

"Bravo, Shooting Star," Bill said, clapping as he rose up from his front row center seat on top of dream!Puppet Boy's head. "This show is definitely going to be one for the ages."

Her response was pretty much exactly as Bill expected it would be.

"Aaaah! Evil Triangle Jerk Guy who tried to help Gideon and steal Grunkle Stan's memories!"

"That was just business," Bill said, drifting closer. "This, on the other hand," he said, gesturing to the jumble of puppets, props, and set pieces filling the stage around Shooting Star, "was pure pleasure." And surprisingly enough, that wasn't even a lie. Well, call it ninety five percent not a lie due to ulterior motives, but he was definitely enjoying himself here. "In fact, I think this show deserves an award. Here, have a head that's always screaming!" He conjured a head into existence and threw it to her.

"Ugh," the kid grunted as she caught it. "Although," she mused, her initial look of surprised disgust turning speculative as she shoved a sock puppet into the head's mouth to shut it up, "this would be a handy way for me to practice giving makeovers."

"I can give you all kinds of fun stuff if you let me…." And the game was on.

She turned him down in the end, of course. That was all part of the plan. And if things kept going according to plan, as he knew they would, then she wouldn't turn him down the next time.

* * *

**[Friday, the 15th]**

Things did not go exactly according to plan the next morning, but only because they somehow managed to go even better than Bill had expected. The bright red keyboard print emblazoned across Pine Tree's face from where he had once again fallen asleep on top of the battered old computer was a thing of hideous beauty. An even greater thing of beauty was the casual way in which Gabe indirectly belittled all of Shooting Star's efforts without realizing it. It was truly perfect. If Bill didn't know better, he might have thought the kid knew Bill's goals and was actively working to help him achieve them.

Bill did know better, though. He had peeked into the kid's dreams the first night after Shooting Star had set her sights on him at the library, and the only thing that those dreams contained was puppets, puppets, and more puppets, literally puppets all the way down. It was a creepy amount of puppets in that dreamscape, which was saying a lot coming from a dream demon who liked to wear people like meatsuits whenever the opportunity arose.

Puppet fetishes aside, Bill wasn't about to look a gift Nidhogg in the mouth if it wanted to gnaw on the roots of Shooting Star's self-confidence without any prompting on his part, so he enjoyed watching Puppet Boy do his thing and then exit stage left (pursued by lovelorn stares) as soon as his work was done. Bill took even greater enjoyment from watching the renewed frenzy of frantic crafting and rewrites which the encounter sent Shooting Star into. It meant that it was time to step in and make himself known.

Shooting Star worked like mad on all aspects of her puppet show for hours, powered by determination and hideous homemade drinks full of sugar, caffeine, and a surprisingly higher amount of plastic than humans usually put in their food on purpose, but eventually the previous night's disturbed rest and a post-Mabel Juice crash put her exactly where Bill wanted her. Staying awake and focused became more and more of an effort for her, until she got up and left her friends working at their assigned tasks on the floor of the Mystery Shack's rec room and went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face in an attempt to keep herself alert. Alone and drifting towards sleep was the perfect state for Bill to nudge her into the mindscape for a little chat.

Color drained away from the world around them, leaving Shooting Star and Bill, who was now visible to her if only she would look in the right direction, as the only local points of color surrounded by dead greyscale. At first Shooting Star didn't notice the change, but that was understandable seeing as how she still had her head bent over the sink, and there wasn't much to notice when clear water, white porcelain, and speckled old chrome fixtures went monochrome.

"Get it together, Mabel," she muttered with forced cheer, as she continued to splash water on her face. "You can do this. There's still over twenty four hours until show time. That's plenty of time to punch up the script, and the musical score, and build bigger sets, and upgrade the materials and construction quality of all the puppets, and run tech at the theater, and do a dress rehearsal." With a sigh, she collected one last handful of water in her cupped palms and threw it onto her face before turning off the tap. She straightened up and looked herself in the eye in the mirror hanging over the sink. "You've got this," she insisted to herself.

"Of course you do," Bill said cheerily as he drifted into view behind her own reflected image. "But I think I know a guy who could help you have it even more securely in hand if you just asked for a little help."

"You again," she shouted as the sudden rush of adrenaline triggered by the surprise gave her the jolt of alertness which the cold water had failed to provided. She spun around and flailed at the space which, up until that moment, had been behind her.

Bill wasn't there, of course. He waited for her to stop trying to punch, slap, and karate chop the empty air and then gave her a friendly wave and tip of the hat from inside the mirror when she finally turned around to face him again.

She responded by trying to punch into the mirror's image. With enough deliberate concentrated focus, she could have hit him, but she didn't have that right now, not like when they had fought inside of Stan Pines's mindscape. In this moment, she was reacting on pure instinct, lashing out as if the mindscape played by something resembling the same rules as the physical world, when in practice the pseudo-physics of this place functioned by whatever rules or lack thereof the person calling the shots wanted there to be. And since Bill was the only one currently deliberately trying to bend things to his will, he was the one calling the shots.

Therefore, instead of shattering or allowing her fist to pass through as if going through the surface of water like she might have been expecting, the mirror bent and deformed under the force of her blow like a stretching rubber sheet. Then it snapped back with a greater than equal but opposite reaction, throwing her backwards to land softly in a comfy overstuffed wing-backed arm chair which Bill thought into existence for just that purpose. It even had extra soft fluffy upholstery, because Bill prided himself on being able to play to his audience when he wanted to.

He maybe shouldn't have made that upholstery quite so reminiscent of silky long-haired cat fur, though, because when she leaned back into it as he tried to step out of the mirror, it seemed to spark a mental connection to a memory of their previous fight, which instantly led to her jumping up to stand on the seat of the chair while shouting, "Kitten fists!" which of course sent large pink cat heads flying in his direction from where her hands usually were.

"Woah there, kid," Bill called, ducking out of the way. "Take it easy! I come in peace."

"Pbbht, yeah right," she said. "Kitten fists with laser vision!"

This called forth a flying cat head which shot focused rainbow heat beams out of its eyes and vaporized Bill's hat.

Bill could have fought back. He could have squashed her like a bug, or at least squashed her mental avatar of herself within the mindscape, which might not cause any bodily injury but could sure cause a heck of a lot of psychic anguish. He could have done a lot of really horrible things to her, but none of that would get him what he wanted, which was access to a physical vessel so he could operate on the physical plane. That needed to be given up willingly, at least to the extent of willingness as provided by uninformed consent. Therefore, Bill needed to play nice, at least for now. The squashing like a bug part could wait until later. It would be a lot more satisfying once he could bring his own physical form to this plane of existence anyway.

Trying to deescalate a situation wasn't usually one of Bill's go-to moves, but how hard could it be? Logic would suggest that the first step was to be able to get a word in edgewise without getting shot in the face with kitten heads, so he ducked all the way back into the mirror and behind the edge of the frame, so he would be out of sight. Simultaneously, he made the chair's arms reach up and wrap around her, pinning her arms to her sides while pulling her back down into a sitting position. Not in a violent or crushing way, but firm and implacable, like those stupidly useless things humans liked to do to each other with their arms. What was it called? A hurk? No, that was one of the noised people tended to make when you _did_ crush them. The word Bill was looking for right now was a "hug." Yeah, that was it, a hug.

It didn't seem to be having as much of an effect as Bill had hoped. The kid was still shouting and struggling.

"Why isn't this working?" Bill demanded. "You supposedly love hugs even more so than the average human."

"I love hugs a hundred times more than the average human, but I don't love hugs from jerks, you jerk, not even by proxy," Shooting Star snarled at him without pausing in her attempts at squirming out of the chair's embrace, and Bill only managed to keep her from wriggling free by adding a gecko foot-like adhesive quality to the upholstery's fur. It didn't take long for the kid to realize that she was well and truly stuck, at which point she reverted to her previous attack, calling, "Kitten fists, do what you do best!"

Luckily for Bill, having her arms pinned against her sides meant that the kid shot downward into the chair. The cat heads of course became just as trapped in the adhesive fur as she was. Unlike Shooting Star, though, the cat heads appeared to be enjoying themselves, purring and wallowing around in the fur as much as disembodied heads could.

"Aw, phooey," she grumbled, "of course what kitten fists really do best is snuggle adorably at every opportunity." However, her dejection only lasted for a split second before she rallied and, turning the grudging smile tugging at the corners of her mouth into a scowl of determination, said, "I guess I'll just have to do this myself. Triangle-seeking Electro-piranha Vision!" With that declaration, lightning bolts fired out of Shooting Star's eyes and formed into jagged glowing outlines of a school of carnivorous fish as they flew through the air. They swam through the air and into the mirror, where they circled Bill like and especially luminescent fishnado for a few moments before all diving inward and striking at once, latching onto any available part of him, including the hat which he had just regenerated.

"Okay, okay, I give up," Bill said as he waved a white flag around (which quickly gained a couple of electro-piranhas hanging off of it) and made a big show of stumbling out of the mirror and letting himself fall into the sink. The law of gravity was always optional for him, but falling on your rear made for a good display of vulnerability to the majority of species in the multiverse and didn't cost him anything, so there was no reason not to give it his all. He let the furry chair tilt forward, deposit Shooting Star on her feet, and then vanish. "I just wanted to lend you a few _hands_ for your puppet show," he said, raising his two electro-piranha covered arms plus thirty seven others of varying lengths which he sprouted to show off how useful he could be in her current situation. He made all thirty nine limbs tremble slightly to appear feeble. "But it looks like you're more than powerful enough to do everything you want with only your handful of friends and no help from me," he continued, "so I'll just be on my way."

Shooting Star crossed her arms and looked skeptical. "Even if I did need or want your help, why should I trust you after what you tried to do to Grunkle Stan?"

"Because, like I said before, that was just business," Bill assured her. "I only did what I did because Gideon made a deal with me. If you make a deal with me, then I'll do what you say for me to do instead."

"And what do you want out of this deal in return? To steal more things out of our brains? To take my teeth out and give them to a deer? To kidnap Waddles and dress him like an endearingly winsome little piggy version of you?"

"Nothing like that, kid," Bill said. "All I want out of this deal is for you to give me a puppet of my very own, to do whatever I want with it. C'mon, what's the harm when you have more puppets than you can handle right now?" He gestured to their surroundings where there were puppets in assorted stages of completion draped over every available surface even though they were in a bathroom. "I like puppets, and you say you like puppets, so this should be a point of common ground for us, not anything to fight about. If you give me a puppet, I'll help you make your puppet show more wildly over the top than anyone in this town has ever seen before, simple as that." He stuck out one hand towards her and wiggled it invitingly while igniting it with blue fire. "What do you say? Do we have a deal?"

"If that's really all there is to it, then I don't see what the harm is," Mabel said contemplatively, tapping her chin with one finger as she thought. "I guess we could make a deal." She reached towards his flaming hand, but yanked her own hand back at the last moment, saying, "But wait!"

"Argh! What is it now?!?" Bill groused, launching himself to hover above the sink, all pretense of weakness forgotten in his frustration.

"First, I need to know which puppet you want," she said.

"Does it really matter?"

"Of course it matters," she insisted, waving her arms around for emphasis. "I can't just go handing out any old puppet willy-nilly, you know." Then she leaned in and closer and whispered, "I'm planning to give some of the fanciest hero puppets to Gabe as courting gifts."

It was all Bill could do to hold back from lashing out, but apparently Shooting Star wasn't finished yet.

"I know," she exclaimed, her eyes suddenly alight with glee instead of with the threat of shooting more electro-piranhas at him, "you can have the first prototype monster puppet!"

Bill rolled his eye, but only a little bit. "And why would I want that one?"

"Well, there's this scene in the show where Puppet Gabe fights a monster," Shooting Star said, "and I built the first version as a proof of concept, but then I decided to go bigger and in more of a giant kracken sort of direction for the design than the Godzilla-but-with-wings direction I had started with. The first version doesn't have a role in the show anymore, so there's no reason to give it to Gabe. Also, you seem like the kind of guy who would appreciate a puppet that can breathe fire."

"Uh-huh," Bill said. Then the last bunch of words out of the kid's mouth had time to sink in. "Wait, did you say it breaths fire?" Now that got Bill's interest. An actual puppet would be a lot more difficult to pilot than a living body with muscles and a nervous system (bones were a lot more optional than most people thought), but the idea of a fire breathing puppet intrigued him.

"Yup," she said, grinning.

He really lived the way this kid's mind worked. Maybe he didn't need to throw her away as just another useless pawn or squash her like a bug later. It would take more time and effort, but if he won her over to his side then she could make a great addition to his collection of Henchmaniacs.

"You got yourself a deal kid," he said, reigniting his hand and offering to Shooting Star again. "And to sweeten the pot, I can show you where there's a secret stash of extra fireworks hidden in this shack, to help make your grand finale extra explosive."

"Well, I do sometimes like to pretend I'm the god of destruction," she said thoughtfully. "It's a deal," she agreed, grasping his flaming hand and shaking it to seal the bargain.

"I can definitely work with that!" Bill might not have a mouth as humans understood it, but his eye made it obvious that he was grinning as he said, "This looks like the start to a beautiful friendship," and for once he wasn't lying at all.

**The End**


End file.
